Trauma, at first, is a wet wool blanket on the brain. You lie still, unable to move, and you don’t even notice the musty smell — you just give in completely to your body’s most basic functions. You can’t find your words but you can walk a confident path through the snake-like hospital labyrinth. You want to weep over simple arithmetic, but you can successfully maneuver your children through their bed time routines. Nothing is of your own volition, but you don’t resent the loss of control; you simply move forward where you can.

It’s later, I think, maybe seven or eight days in, when your senses figure out where your brain’s been holding you hostage. Each morning you wake a little bit sharper, a little more selfish. You start to whine. You start to notice the way you smell, how little you packed, how cramped your quarters and lumpy your makeshift bed. You find yourself crying over mismatched socks when four or five days earlier it hadn’t even occurred to you to do laundry, or that you even had feet at all.

Suddenly, you want to scream at everyone. You want to answer every flippant, oblivious email with Do you have any idea where I am? How could you ask me that?? You want them all to know the depths of your suffering. You want to kick the world in the shin of the leg it’s stupidly spinning on. You know now that everyone is going to be okay, that you’re only a few days from home, and so you are remembering, worrying, floundering. Your to-do list rises to the surface after you thought you’d weighted her down with enough stones and rope and brick — a surprise. You thought you’d learned to simply appreciate the “little things” but you haven’t, as it turns out, and you hate yourself.

And then, the sky. A sky larger and clearer and fuller than you’ve seen in ages. You stumble into a shallow bowl in a crisp, fallow wheat field and maybe you had to throw yourself off a cliff to find this spot but find it you did, and you forget everything else, because you hear something. The sky is calling you without yelling. She rearranges her lap to accommodate you despite your crass, whiny bulk, and she wipes your snotty face and she is generous as she whispers Sit. Rest. I’m so, so sorry.

I’m just so sorry.

And you believe her. And you feel bad for ever waxing so pathetic. And you settle into that soft spot where she cleaves and in that moment you know in your marrow that you don’t need anything, any time, anywhere, more than this.

She says mommy for the 47th time in as many minutes and I’m losing it, slowly, an internal bleed. Mommy? I’m hungry. Mommy, did you see this? Mommy, my favorite color is orange now. Mommy, where’s my milk? Mommy, stupid is a bad word, right? My responses start escaping sharper, quicker; my eye rolls become uncontainable. I want to to scream, “I AM THE ONLY PERSON IN THE ROOM SO I REALIZE IT IS ME YOU ARE ADDRESSING!” but instead I say, “I’ll get you something, Emma. That’s neat, Emma! You don’t say, Emma. Over there, Emma. Yes it is, Emma!” I shuffle and float, dodge and duck, absorb her verbal blows because honestly, all I can think about is my friends who would give anything to hear their babies say mommy again just one more time and so I shut my mouth, clamp it tight, smile. I have no right to feel this. But I wonder, secretly, a whisper creeping like fog up my throat and evaporating before it hits my lips: Surely those mamas once felt this, too?

*

It’s Saturday night and we brave, for the first time, the bowling alley down the way. It’s packed with people and smoke, they’re lapping it up, soaking it in, like sauna inhabitants in some filthy backwards spa. We order a spread of various fried foods, slip into borrowed shoes, and I shudder; I can’t help myself, I’m feeling superior. I hate when that toxic feeling comes on and I’m trying to shove it out, trying to be like my kids (unseeing), trying not to notice as they run their hungry fingers along grimy video games and vending machines (seeing anyway), smiling at my fellow bowlers (see? We are one.)

We sit down to eat and the worst of them wanders up to our table. He shakes and slurs; I can’t decide if he is only drunk, or something more. He addresses my husband, tells him what a good looking family he has here; I can’t decide if he is leering. Emma is oblivious but Gretta, now nine, squirms. I hold as still as I can and smile brightly — one day she will learn to quash her instincts in the name of polite behavior, as all women do, unfortunately.

Then he says, “I had a beautiful family once, too” and, to my horror, he begins to cry.

*

Sometimes birds mistake our chimney for a tunnel to some sort of safe, dry haven and they come charging in, a crash and slide of feathers and squawks and claws screeching down the metal pipe. They land, and after a beat or two they blink stupidly at me through the glass, not thinking about where they are, just wondering why they can’t get to the light. Helping them escape is tricky; you can’t just open the door and let them fly loose into the house — they won’t head for the open front door, but rather beat themselves to death against the windows and wooden beams. Instead, you have to crack the woodstove door ever so slightly, slide one arm in and close a gentle fist around the creature, feel its heart smack against your palm impossibly fast as you walk outside, until you release it the heavens, a magic trick.

This time we aren’t here for her arrival, and we’re too late. Normally they can live for a while inside the stove but not if we’ve had a fire recently; the forgotten logs still breathe intense heat. Dave picks her up by one wing and carries her out, a pallbearer, my daughters and a cloud of soot her funeral procession. They keep on coming, though, into the darkness. I can’t figure it out. Is it the heat the draws them?

*

We can’t live so viscerally, so close to the heat of this love, can we? In the face of other mothers’ losses I pull my spared children into vice-grip embraces and every time I think of the pain my friends endure I feel a sweep of nausea. I think, Remember this. Love them hard. Appreciate this. Be here now. Do not ever take it for granted. Don’t you realize what could happen? Live like this, every day, every moment. DO. NOT. FORGET. It’s tight and it hurts and it makes me feel dizzy, but can I keep it up? Should I keep it up?

Tell me it’s okay to take it all for granted at times, to lose my cool over their white-hot needs, to pine for a book and a bottle of wine and a quiet back room. Tell me it’s alright to only pretend to like the bowling, the Littlest Petshops, the hide-and-seek. Tell me that everyone takes it all for granted sometimes, that living focused on the potential for loss is neither healthy nor sustainable. Tell me that shoving them all out the door with a picnic lunch and a to-do list is not one of those things I’ll dwell on should the unthinkable ever visit me here. Tell me that I won’t lose them just because I looked away for a minute, that rolling my eyes and forgetting my patience won’t draw the ire of fate. Who can keep seeking this heat without head-to-toe burns, without singeing her wings? Surely not me.

These are the things I tell myself, but I don’t know what I believe.

I can’t explain to my family why I’m so sad today; there’s no way they would understand. The only people who will get it are you, you out there, and so I’ve come to this space to add my liquid prayer to your ocean of empathy, to set it a-sail, to hope it reaches its rightful owner.

I mean, what can I say to my husband? That a “friend’s” 17-month-old daughter died unexpectedly? Because we’re not really friends, right? I’ve never met the Spohr’s.

But I know their names as solidly as I know anyone’s in my “real life.” More than that, so much more than that, I know that sweet baby girl’s face. How many times have I scrolled over it in my Reader, my own daughters screaming, “Stop!” My four-year-old smacking her warm palm down on my mouse-hand, saying, “Wait! Go back! Show me dat cute giwl again. I know her! Who is dat, mommy? I know her!”

Because they saw that face a time or two on this computer, and it was the kind of face you can’t forget. It was the kind of face that triggered an instant grin on my own. How many times did I lean across the couch to my husband, giggle, and show him that face? Watch his own smile break like a wave?

Still. I am here, on spring break, shuffling through the sand a bit slower, hanging back, healthy and blessed and happy and yet, not. Hugging my girls a bit tighter, answering their questions a beat or two late, distracted. Grief-stricken.

How do we explain to the rest of the world how well we have come to know each other, all of us here? So that if one of us suffers an unfathomable loss we feel it like our own gut-punch? Who is that, mommy? I know her!

I knew her too, baby.

I’m shocked. I’m sad. And I’m so, so sorry.

May she light up heaven the way she lit up earth.

***

In lieu of flowers, the Spohr’s have asked that donations be made to the March of Dimes in Maddie’s name. The link is here.

We hit the road this morning and all I could think about was how and when and where I’d have the chance to post this picture of us, this purple blessing, in time for Maddie’s burial — when word came through that there’s been another one. Another unfathomable loss, a double punch to the kidney, and My God how can this be happening? And so we stopped almost halfway home and I’m here with the Internet, sliding unnaturally atop some faux-fabric bedspread, my head propped up by styrofoam hotel pillows, my heart propped up by the (guilty) knowledge that my own children are splashing happily in the pool downstairs and that I don’t know this horrifying loss, and I didn’t know these sweet, sweet children, but I know this love and even a touch of the weight of the idea of anything happening to them is enough to crush me flat in an instant.

Eight hours in the car today and I kept checking Twitter on my phone, and I swear for the first time ever I’m not annoyed by hashtags, I’m seeking them out, the #maddie’s, the #thalon’s, like beacons, and it’s so strange, isn’t it? In times of great confusion and profound tragedy we just want to be among others who are equally impacted, like after Columbine or September 11, and so this is what we do, we head to the chapels and the temples and the public parks and the malls and we shuffle together slowly, as one, taking comfort in the lull of the sound of our communal footsteps and that’s really what the blogosphere has become to me, you know? And everyone was there today, following the hashtags, each tweet and post a gonging of the bell, the Church of Twitter.

And look what it has done, what it’s still doing. $30,000 raised for the March of Dimes, another $10,000 for her bereft parents. Articles, blog posts, walks organized in dozens of states, real, tangible help and hope for people who can barely breathe right now, and it’s repeating itself for Thalon as I type. Not bad for a “pretend” world, huh?

I know these sweet children are not in pain and so tonight I am praying for the parents left behind, not only for Heather and Shana, but also for the women who feel this ache more acutely, more keenly, than the rest of us will ever know, for as we are imagining this special kind of horror and shuddering, they are actually remembering and combusting all over again. For Kate. For Tanis. For Betsey. For Loralee. For Shan. For Auds. For Jill. For Won. For my Aunt Kat. For all the rest I haven’t named here, and I know there are many, so many, too many. Tonight I want you to think of my prayers, our prayers, like fireworks with infinite sparks, hot and fierce and bright, and not a one of us will burn out. I hope it will bring you just enough light to see at least the first foot or two of your path. I wish there were brighter words.

***

For the grieving: Glow in the Woods

To help Thalon’s family click here.

To help Maddie’s family:

It’s 11pm and my cousin sends out a tweet about these kids, these high school kids. The snow’s coming hard and they’ve been in an accident and two of them are dead and we should keep them in our thoughts. My heart is very literal (whether I like it or not) and so I stuff my thoughts full to bursting immediately. I click the links to the two Twitter profiles she’s talking about, and I click link after link after that, and before I know it I’m following this horrific breadcrumb trail through tar-black woods until I’m boiling in some sad witch’s stew and I’m an onion, an onion bobbing and drowning in the broth, losing my layers one by one as the heat rises, as my heart expands. I feel split clean apart over a handful of teenagers I don’t even know. Because I’m seeing it unfold, play out in real time, their horror, their disbelief, their anger, their grief, and, for three of them, now, their last words. And they are real lives, extinguished. And they are baffled friends, in sudden mourning. And I am a 34-year-old Wisconsin housewife, a stranger to them all, huddled up to my iPhone in bed on a frigid, wicked night. Privy to their shattering.

***

“This is why the Internet is bad,” my husband says for the 200th time this year. “You know too many people. You love them all. You used to have a normal amount of friends.” It’s a couple weeks ago now, the day after A’s stroke, and I’m ruining our date night by slumping too low in my booth, by fiddling around on Twitter for updates, by ignoring him completely. “So what are you saying?” I shoot back at him, trying not to hiss. “That I’d be better off if I didn’t know her? That I’d be happier with fewer friends? With less love? That it’s not worth it?” He answers only with a shrug and silence, and I poke around inside it for a while trying to finger out his answer, before giving up and diving back inside my phone.

***

Last week now, at lunch with my friends over Thanksgiving break, and the talk turns to gossip about a prominent civil servant in our too-small town. One by one we speculate, what we’ve heard, what it means, who said what, and my best friend’s husband, a city boy, turns to me then and says under his breath, “This is my worst nightmare.” And he means this, this, a table full of strangers dissecting another person’s life like a trapped lab frog, high school style. I nod in agreement, say, “Mine, too.” But, at the same time, that’s basically my life, that’s your life now, too, to varying degrees across this bold, new spectrum. If you are here, reading a blog, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You are connected, tuned in, eavesdropping, sharing. You are invested in my life, maybe just a little bit, maybe a whole lot, and I can probably say the same about you. We ache for connection and we love a good train wreck, whether we realize it or not, admit to it or not. When something terrible happens to one of us we can’t help it, we immediately start cataloging our shared experiences, look for ways we are strung together, end up, unfortunately, piggybacking on the pain. It’s normal, or at least, our new normal, with this ridiculous amount of information at our hungry fingertips. We don’t mean any harm, and we try to do good deeds with it, but it is what it is. At least we know it, mostly. We are adults.

What fascinates me, though, is the kids. The kids don’t know it yet. The history books analyzing and quantifying social media’s impact have not yet been written, and our kids are living it in real time. It’s so much more complicated than an unseemly Google trail. It is seeing terrible things written about yourself on Facebook and buckling quietly under the blow. It is a stolen first kiss, captured by a “friend” on camera phone and text-blasted to the world. It is speaking without thinking, it is poorly-chosen words and decisions forever enshrined, and it is this, this raw grieving, this public keening, this spraying of gun-blasted soul pieces all over the world wide web for nosy, well-meaning mother strangers to dissect and blog about and obsess over on this, the first real snow of winter.

I could care less about Search Engine Optimization. I could care less about a bullet point rundown on social media, on how to do it right,  on the best way to trick traffic, on all the ways I do things wrong here on this site. I’m far more interested in what it all means, in how to steer my daughters through, on what it’s doing to our collective consciousness to bear these connections, to bare these truths, to stand here, exposed, hands outstretched.